SpaceX-xAI merger reactions, Paypal plummets, Disney names next CEO | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console -https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn https://graphite.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid -https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Ramp -https://ramp.com https://ramp.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/welcome/ Shopify - https://shopify.com https://shopify.com/ Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Cisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.html Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://tbpn.com/ https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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• 0:02Jordi Hays?

  Important announcement from Oracle. Our partners financing with Doña Anna County, New Mexico, Shackelford County, Texas, and Port Washington, Wisconsin data centers are secured at market standard rates, progressing through final syndication on schedule and consistent with investment-grade deals. So if this makes you worry, a lot of other people agree. This is their most recent post after yesterday, they announced the Nvidia OpenAI deal had zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI. We remain highly confident in OpenAI's ability to raise funds and meet its commitments.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  So what did Rune say? Rune said, "My confident in OpenAI's abilities to raise fund t-shirt has a lot of people asking questions already answered by my t-shirt." It's just 2,000 likes.

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  Interesting comm strategy. They've been hiding comments under this. I think they've stopped doing that because people are saying, "What an odd thing to say." Brendan says, "Guys, just stop tweeting. Whoever you have running PR comms needs to be fired. You're making it worse."

• 1:01John Coogan?

  It is, it is very weird to take this to X specifically. It's such a conversational platform.

• 1:06Jordi Hays?

  Hey, we want to start a conversation about concerns around our...

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Well, also, just, I mean, it's a total rejection of the going direct thing. Like, this would be wildly different if it came from the CEO, co-CEOs, or Larry Ellison directly, even, and it had like way more nuance. It's very odd when it has like the corporate press release.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  This screams that no one in comms actually uses X.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  It's like, we needed to put this out, and they didn't really consider X.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  The channel?

• 1:31John Coogan?

  And maybe, this probably went over fine in a press release or something, but just on X, it's a completely different context. And there's so much subtext with all the different partners actively being there. And even like low-level employees chiming in from companies that are implicated in this. There's like all this different...

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  I like how you compare Oracle's strategy of like the nameless, faceless announcement that just concerns everyone to Rune actually from OpenAI commenting and just joking about it. And it actually gives you more confidence.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Like, somebody, somebody looked at the Rune post and was like, "Oh, F, even Rune stopped shilling. We're F." And Rune's like, "No, it's just a funny tweet." Doing great and that instills way more confidence.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  Gabe quoted the yesterday's post and just said, okay, yay.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  Okay, yay.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  Of course, Oracle's down 5% today, but honestly, looking good compared to some other names.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's going on?

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  PayPal down a full 20% today. Switched out their CEO.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Oh, that makes sense.

• 2:33Jordi Hays?

  This, you know, had some, some Q4 results that people weren't super exciting about and people aren't excited about the forecasts either. You look at, uh, Sheil had a, had a, kind of was prodding Elon. He said, come on Elon, you've always wanted PayPal to be X, the financial super app. Now's a great opportunity. PayPal right now is valued at less than what X was in the take private.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:58Jordi Hays?

  And X is obviously working on a bunch of different financial features.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  I thought PayPal all time high was in the multi, like hundreds of billions.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:04John Coogan?

  It's 40 billion now. Yeah. Add that in. Yeah, it was, it was way up. It's down 85% in the last five years. Uh, I mean, truthfully, like a lot of people have moved on. They're use, uh, you know, Cash App and.

• 3:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but they own Venmo.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, Venmo. Venmo is still very like millennial, right?

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  It's, it's sort of like, and, and people do use the Apple, Apple Pay transfers, Apple Cash. Like there's been a number of, you know, shots across the bow for PayPal that they haven't responded to fully.

• 3:30Jordi Hays?

  I mean, they're net, they're net revenue, net revenue.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  They own Venmo because they acquired Braintree. It wasn't even like an in-house, like really aggressive move. They, they sort of just lucked out with Venmo.

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  PayPal, the $40 billion public company, had 2025 net revenue of 33 billion.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  So, not great. Uh, major sell off in pretty much all software today. Snap is close to all time lows at $6.70 despite growing revenues and profits. Serenity says, here's why the financial engineering looks criminal. Snapchat is an 11 and a half billion dollar company with a billion MAU and Q3 adjusted EBITDA of 132 million. However, stock comp for the last 12 months, two and a half billion dollars. Really, really insane, uh, number. This is, I mean, always been the, uh, General criticism of Snap, but looks like they have not adjusted course yet.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  It's interesting seeing the gap between monetization, between Meta a billion Mao and Snap a billion Mao. It's like a 10x delta.

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and which is why like you were doing some napkin math on OpenAI. And I think that's like-

• 4:37John Coogan?

  They have a billion Mao, do they monetize like Meta or do they monetize like Snap and on what timeline?

• 4:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or worse.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  They have Fiji CMO, I think they could get to Meta level, you know, monetization and ARPU. But it also, they could be lingering in the Snap territory, which is, I think, 5 billion over the last year.

• 4:55Jordi Hays?

  Matt Slotnick commenting on the sell-off in software. All of this because Azure grew 39% instead of 39.4%. Of course, there's a lot more going on here. Buco says nots, it's that the labs can hypothetically one-shot you, so why stand in front of that train? Why express, quote, "short AI in the marketplace"? High Yield Harry says, wow, this software company is getting destroyed by AI today. It's Huventus, soccer team, down 13%.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  Everything's just down.

• 5:27Jordi Hays?

  Getting, I guess people think that somebody's going to make Claude code for soccer.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  Well, your inside man below says the robots are going to be playing. And he has a photo of, or a GIF of robots playing soccer.

• 5:39Jordi Hays?

  That seems bullish. We'll see. Bitcoin also down dramatically. Joe Weisenthal has it up.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  Seven three now, absolute crash today, down 13% over the last, over the last five days. Over almost 20% over the last month. Lots of selling activity going on.

• 5:58Jordi Hays?

  Jim Cramer is now giving advice to Michael Saylor. He says, oh my, Bitcoin 73,000 beckons as the Dow hits a record high. Our chartist last night said, this is it. The level that cannot be-

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Chartist?

• 6:12Jordi Hays?

  Our chartist.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  Chartist?

• 6:14Jordi Hays?

  The level that cannot be breached. It is time for strategy, also known as mass.

• 6:21John Coogan?

  Micro strategy was the former name, now it's just strategy.

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  Also known as mister for its mister symbol, to do a spot secondary or convert and stop this decline. Come on, Mike, step up. It's just always rough when, when Jim Cramer is just like, you know, stream of consciousness posting at you. So we'll see what, what Saylor does. They, they have earnings on Thursday and that will certainly be an interesting call.

• 6:42John Coogan?

  More more details on the PayPal shares plunging nearly 20% CEO exit. They replaced their CEO Alex Criss, who was brought in to steer the payments firm through slowing growth and heightened competition, and simultaneously issued a lackluster profit forecast for 2026 on Tuesday, sending its shares down 19%. The board, the company's board, which named HP's Enrique Lores as its new president and CEO, said the pace of change in execution under Criss was not in line with its expectations. Criss was tasked with turning around PayPal during a challenging period as post pandemic trading volumes declined and competitive pressures in its core business intensified from large technology companies and newer fintech rivals. It does feel like, you know, in the press release economy, it would be, it would have

• 7:23John Coogan?

  been so easy for PayPal to do some sort of deal with stock trading or prediction markets. Like every financial app and news product and grocery store, like everyone is like doing some sort of deal at least, even if it doesn't materialize, even if it doesn't move the needle, at least they're, they're sort of putting their best foot forward. And PayPal, you know, you still mostly hear about it in the context of what are the PayPal co-founders up to now? Oh, they're building rivals to the original company. PayPal said CFO Jamie Miller would serve as interim CEO until Lores assumes the role on March 1st. That's a pretty quick transition. Wall Street analysts said the unexpected CEO announcement raises questions about the company's turnaround strategy. Disney's been going through a CEO transition, but it's been massively telegraphed with,

• 8:09John Coogan?

  you know, a contract that ended this year. Okay, you know, a story last week about, hey, we're moving faster. Hey, we're bringing somebody in who's internal, who's already knows the company in inside and out. And things have been a lot.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy that even with $33 billion of revenue, they're, they're, they're worth roughly like three and a half circles. Circle, obviously, you know, just tiny, tiny company in comparison to PayPal. You would think that PayPal, they don't have an obvious like AI, like what's the obvious AI bear case, right?

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  They move money, they're heavily regulated. You can imagine them figuring out ways to work better with agents and, and capitalize on the stablecoin boom, but we'll see what the new CEO ends up doing.

• 8:53John Coogan?

  The big question is whether he will bring in a formidable payments team to attempt yet another multi-year turnaround.

• 8:58Jordi Hays?

  Do they not have a formidable payments team?

• 9:01John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  Who you got?

• 9:05John Coogan?

  Or they will look to start

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  I would hope the payments company with half a billion active users

• 9:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  Has a formidable payments team.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  Apparently not according to Evercore.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  You lack formidability. PayPal expects full year adjusted profit to range between low single digit percentage decline and slight increase compared with Wall Street expectations of about eight percent growth. The change comes against the backdrop of weakening retail spending as shoppers squeezed by elevated interest rates, stubbornly high living costs and sign of softening. May the labor market cut back on discretionary purchases and prioritize everyday necessities, stuff that's not probably purchased with PayPal.

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  David in the YouTube chat says PayPal did participate in the press release economy.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  They did.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  They announced a deal with ChatGPT at the end of last year in Q4. In 2026 PayPal will become the first digital wallet embedded directly into ChatGPT, allowing users to make purchases instantly without leaving the platform. Feels feels very oversold, but

• 10:01John Coogan?

  And they also missed on the holiday quarter. So analysts were estimating that they'd make 8.8 billion and they only made 8.68 billion. And so, you know, we saw a pretty strong holiday quarter. There was a lot of growth across e-commerce activity. We talked to Sean Frank at Ridge. Everyone was having like, there were a lot of jitters about is the consumer healthy? But a lot of, a lot of the growing platforms were able to outrun any softening in consumer confidence by just onboarding more companies, onboarding more customers. And so if you're declining while everyone else is accelerating, that's going to be an issue.

• 10:39Jordi Hays?

  Ted says gold is dumping, silver is dumping, Bitcoin is dumping, Ethereum is dumping, DXY is dumping, stocks are dumping. If everything is going down, where's the money actually going? We talked about this last week. Sell everything. Sell your dollars, sell your stocks, sell your crypto, sell your bonds.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  Freak out, actually.

• 10:56Jordi Hays?

  Freak out, yeah.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Panic sell everything.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  Nikita says data centers, raw materials and land. If intelligence is rapidly becoming free, expect a rapid rotation out of bytes and into bits. A lot of blue chip assets will soon be repriced.

• 11:09John Coogan?

  I don't know. I'm excited to talk to Aaron Levy about this, about the SaaS apocalypse, what's happening with software.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  Deep Dish says this is a pretty common misconception that money has to go somewhere. That's not how market caps are measured. They're measured by last price, time shares, contracts outstanding, not how much money you'd get for liquidating the whole pile. TLDR, the money was never there. Josh?

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  Di Amaro, is the new CEO of Disney effective next month?

• 11:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  This cycle moved very quickly, right?

• 11:38John Coogan?

  It did. At the same time, I think, I think it was managed pretty well.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  Disney's only down 1% today, I think.

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Iger will stay on the board and serve as a senior advisor until his retirement on December 31. And Dana Walden was named to a new role as president and chief creative officer of Disney. Iger just got the, got the OpenAI deal done. He's like, I handled the AI transition perfectly.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  I'm monetizing the IP.

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  And I'm out.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  They've only had nine CEOs in 102-year history. The CEO job requires not only running a sprawling empire, but also serving as its high-profile and highly scrutinized public ambassador. Di Amaro, Di Amaro, Di Amaro won a challenging bake-off for the job against Disney's entertainment co-chairman Dana Walden.

• 12:23Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for bake-offs.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  That has been the talk of Hollywood for more than a year. Walden was named to the newly created position of president and chief creative officer. Disney's leadership has been determined to run the succession process as smoothly as possible after its disastrous last try. The company named previous Parks boss Bob Chapek as CEO in 2020, only to fire him and bring back Iger two years later in a corporate coup. There's a whole series of Bobs, Bob Iger, Bob, Bob Chapek over there. The CEO selection was overseen by chairman James Gorman, who joined Disney's board in 2024 after managing a widely praised succession process at Morgan Stanley. Iger was chairman when the board picked Chapek. Disney shares were roughly flat Tuesday. Gorman, in an interview, said that he has seen Iger and Di Amaro work together and is

• 13:13John Coogan?

  confident the handoff will go smoothly this time. There's no tension here. Shareholders will now look to Di Amaro to lay out and execute a growth plan for the company, whose stock price is down by nearly half from its 2021 high, when everyone was rapidly subscribing to Disney Plus and locked in just watching content. They went outside and the shares have slid since and has been essentially stagnant.

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  Never go outside. Never touch grass.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  This is the new Disney campaign.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  Never touch grass.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Run it in the Super Bowl for sure. Gorman said the Wall Street Journal picked the, told the Wall Street Journal that the board picked Di Amaro because of his combination of strategic thinking and an understanding of the creative process as well as his experience working both overseas and in the United States. The fifty-four-year-old spent most of his twenty-eight years at Disney, working in theme parks, in the theme parks business in the US and overseas, overseeing stints at California's Disneyland and Florida's Walt Disney World. In twenty twenty, he has been chairman of Disney's experiences unit, which includes theme parks, cruise ships, and consumer products. All things that should grow in an AI world, even if the, even if there's a lot of like AI slop and there's pressure on the theaters, like.

• 14:23Jordi Hays?

  Should grow, but there's still so many, there's still so many questions, right?

• 14:26John Coogan?

  Why?

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  If you have widespread job loss, does that force a compression in pricing?

• 14:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, but.

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

  Or just overall purchasing power, right? Yeah, it's everyone, but again, you could see there's so much uncertainty. The idea that AI will just magically, like AI getting good will magically make everybody spend more time off the internet is kind of a tough argument to make.

• 14:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:50Jordi Hays?

  Right? Some people react and there's.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Turn word more.

• 14:53Jordi Hays?

  Like, there's this like stated preference, which people are saying, as AI proliferates, people are just gonna log off.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  And I just don't actually see that happening.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'm interested to see when the, the OpenAI Disney deal really like rolls out. Obviously, you still can't generate Disney properties, Disney IP in Zora, or in, or at least not in ChatGPT when I tried. So they're still working on when they will roll that out. We've discussed, like, it will be interesting if they launch like a single piece of IP, like it's Spider-Man week and they're just releasing Spider-Man. And then, and then they wait and then they do Iron Man a week later. So they're like, keep hyping it as opposed to just like, we're opening the floodgates, you can do any Disney IP. Will there be something special there? The bigger question for me is, is what does it look like in the Disney Plus app?

• 15:44John Coogan?

  Because I feel like the Disney Plus app as a parent is a very safe place. Like, there's some stuff in there, but you can like sort of parental control it and most of it's cartoons and most of it's high-quality Pixar stuff. But even if there's a AI-generated feed, how much editorial goes into that, like.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  There's a, there's a pretty wide gap right now between YouTube Kids, which can get sort of crazy, and Disney Plus, which is extremely curated.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  You know, Academy Award winning films are in there and it's like a very, it's a very polished product. And if you start putting AI-generated content in there, maybe some parents will love it because the kids will watch more. But I think a lot of parents would probably be like, I don't know, I'm, I'm, I'm pulling back from that. What are you trying to generate?

• 16:30Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to see if Grok can generate Disney IP.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  Can it?

• 16:34Jordi Hays?

  Not perfectly. We talked about this yesterday. We'll cover it again. Dee Dee shares today. SpaceX just bought XAI that previously bought X. The one point two five trillion dollar merger values XAI at two hundred and fifty billion dollars, with annualized revenue of four hundred and twenty eight million, giving it a clean five hundred and eighty four X revenue multiple. Not bad. And annualized loss of five point eight four billion. More importantly-

• 17:02John Coogan?

  That loss is mostly CapEx, right? I imagine. XAI, yeah, because they're, they're, they're building Colossus. They're, they're buying a ton of chips and so that's where that, that cash loss is coming from.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  I, because I, I'm, I'm, I imagine that the inference is not at that level yet.

• 17:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but of course SpaceX can start helping to foot that bill.

• 17:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  They have the eight billion.

• 17:23John Coogan?

  Eight billion in revenue?

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, eight billion in profit.

• 17:26John Coogan?

  Profit. Yeah, wow. The transaction value SpaceX at one trillion, XAI at two fifty billion. Investors in XAI will receive point one four three three shares of SpaceX for every share of XAI as part of the acquisition. Some XAI executives may opt for cash instead of SpaceX stock at seventy five point four six per share. This marks not just the chap, next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and XAI's mission. Scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars. What a turn of phrase. We'll have to read Elon's post because this one feels like it came directly from him. Uh, I know that the, the Tesla master plan before was sort of like, it's a little corporate, corpo speak, but.

• 18:12Jordi Hays?

  Somebody else was sharing, it is fascinating that, you know, the number, a non-leading lab

• 18:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  is worth, you know, effectively a quarter of what the leading, you know, space telecom company is.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  When you compare the two, it's actually, it actually makes sense. I mean, in many ways, like the XAI shareholder base has a lot of overlap with the SpaceX shareholders. So in the end, I think everyone obviously is doing fine, but certainly the 584x revenue multiple, I think even Sam would take that offer.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. That'd be five trillion, right? Alex Stouffer's shares, that Ramp Sheets called it, the Elon Musk SpaceX plus XAI valued at 1.25 trillion and Ramp Labs used their Agentic spreadsheet to model the proposed merger when there were rumors of advanced talks on July, on January 29th, and they nailed the valuation. So you can kind of watch Ramp Sheets work through the financial modeling there.

• 19:19Jordi Hays?

  It's notable, so some XAI executives are able to offer cash instead of SpaceX shares at $75.46 per share. You think this is just because there's so much pre-IPO demand for SpaceX that people are like, you know, there's plenty of buyers?

• 19:34John Coogan?

  That's a good question. I don't know.

• 19:35Jordi Hays?

  People just want to cash out and move on?

• 19:37John Coogan?

  I mean SpaceX has done like a long history of tender offers and liquidity. So there's probably plenty of demand and just offering that feels like the way. I mean, there's also got to be some people that have been sitting on sort of, I mean, I guess if you were a Twitter employee just a few years ago, you had liquidity. So it's not, it's not the same thing as SpaceX where you joined 20 years ago and you're still waiting for the IPO. So you're like, I need to buy a house. Like those, those tender offers make a lot more sense than, than this. But certainly an interesting decision to be made if you're an XAI executive.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  Logan Bartlett says Nikita Beer, the SpaceX employee. Total, total Nikita victory. I think in many ways, he's been through hell over the last few months. He is often the butt of the joke.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  There were those prediction markets on will he make it through? Will he get fired? Like, there's been so many dustups around, you know, is he paying some people too much with the creator program? Well, now, if you're an X creator and you get that $22 paycheck for your posts, it's coming from SpaceX.

• 20:37John Coogan?

  Love to see it.

• 20:38Jordi Hays?

  Wired had some interesting coverage this morning. Mike Solana called it out. Wired said Elon Musk is rolling XAI into SpaceX, creating the world's most valuable private company. By fusing SpaceX and XAI, which acquired X last year, Elon Musk tightens his grip

• 20:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  over technologies that shape national security, social media, and artificial intelligence.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:59Jordi Hays?

  Of course, this doesn't make any sense.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  So Solana's point is, he says, "Good morning. Elon Musk is, quote, 'tightening his grip over two companies he founded, funded, built, and currently runs.'" So that's a good criticism, but yeah.

• 21:12Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, like going public implies like you're actually, you're loosening your grip, right?

• 21:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  Suddenly, like you have new regulations that you have to follow, like more responsibility.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  SEC.

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  Suddenly, anyone in the world can profit off of your labor.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  Yes. Anyone in the world can loosen your grip a little bit in some way.

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, because if SpaceX, like, you know, put out some big press release and said, "We're never going to go public, we're never doing this," their criticism would be Elon, you know, Elon Inc. is not letting, you know, retail shareholders participate in space and AI.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, or just as a private company, there's, there's, all the financials, all the strategies are more opaque, there's less accountability, there's less regulation, they don't answer to the SEC in the same way. And that's why, you know, a variety of private equity firms do take privates. Like, why are you taking a company private? You're delisting it as a public company. It's no longer public. And so you can do much more ambitious things. You can, you can change the strategy because you don't answer to shareholders.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  John says Elon Musk famous for his loose management style tightens his grip.

• 22:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, famous, famous.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  Eric Berlin says, "Once again, I find myself updating my LinkedIn bio." He says, "Former CEO of Breaker," which was acquired by Twitter, acquired by XCorp, acquired by XAI, acquired by SpaceX. So congratulations to the Breaker team.

• 22:35John Coogan?

  I was, I was, I, I, I was, but I was looking for the most complicated corporate lineage yesterday when we were joking about it. Like, there's someone that's going to have, like, six steps in their resume, and we found him. His name's Eric Berlin, and he founded Breaker. What was Breaker?

• 22:48Jordi Hays?

  Live sports.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 22:50Jordi Hays?

  I think it was meant to basically distribute effectively clips from games

• 22:54John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  in the moment.

• 22:56John Coogan?

  Cool. Oh, yeah, like breaking news. Oh, 2021, Twitter acquired social podcasting app Breaker team to help build Twitter spaces. Twitter has acquired social broadcasting app Breaker, the company announced today.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think the idea was if you were, if there was a crazy play or a game was about to end, they would just stream.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  Just like the last five minutes or something.

• 23:19John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  Suspended cap, so, so let me get this straight. Overpays for Twitter, makes XAI, uses AI hype cycle to absorb Twitter and make everyone whole, then uses SpaceX IPO hype to absorb that entity. Will pump the living S H I T out of the SpaceX IPO and buy more stuff with equity? Like, of course, people keep giving this guy capital, he finds a way, it's crazy.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  It's really, it's really, really true.

• 23:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in, in some ways, I've been thinking about it, is, is, uh, XAI has, you know, they've, they've done, they've done fine. In so many ways, it's, it's been an incredible story, come, come from behind story, uh, competing against, you know, the Googles, the OpenAIs of the world. Um, but it, it hasn't exactly been an easy time in the private markets. Like, going out and having to raise at a $200 billion valuation.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  A lot of money.

• 24:06Jordi Hays?

  When every single investor that you're pitching is looking at OpenAI, they're looking at Anthropic, they're comparing your traction to theirs. All those people that had, were investing in XAI had to just like, say like, you know, full blind faith Elon, like, I know, I know you got us.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  And so this like new transaction was the investment thesis. It was like, hey, like, sort of unlimited upside, somewhat capped downside. The downside scenarios, X, and XAI get rolled in.

• 24:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  Um, and so certainly rewarding, uh, everyone with their loyalty.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, a bunch of, uh, investors have kind of like laid out this thesis of Elon Inc., just Elon, just bet on Elon, don't bet against Elon. Uh, Sean McGuire, I think is on all three, XAI, X and SpaceX, and then Andreessen Horowitz as well is, and they posted an image of like X, SpaceX, XAI. Um, and individually, a lot of those deals were sort of crazy and, and, and critiqued, but, uh, together, everyone's doing very well, so.

• 25:06Jordi Hays?

  We gotta figure out what's going on with the Boring Company. Uh, UAE officials say the first phase of the Dubai Loop project with Musk's Boring Company to start immediately. So they are breaking ground. Uh, over there. Dubai has, UAE has some insane traffic.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  That is a company we have not seen a lot from.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:24John Coogan?

  But I think, I think they're still cooking. I, I know there's, there's been some back and forth about the, the, the Vegas tunnel. Some stuff that's good. Some people are annoyed with like the construction and whatnot, but it seems like, I don't know, it's progressing a little bit. It still seems really, really slow considering, when did he originally post the Hyperloop blog? Like 10 years ago, but building tunnels in the ground.

• 25:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  Difficult, difficult. San Francisco is getting its first nuke scan.

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  You know what this is about?

• 25:51John Coogan?

  Yes. So before the Super Bowl, they fly a helicopter with, uh, radio like detection. So there's someone who asked Grok, like, what is this? And, uh, here it is. Okay. So, uh, somebody said, is this real and how does it work? And said, Grok said, yes, it's real. They fly a helicopter. You drop a, oh no.

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  We don't have any audio. I can't hear what's going on.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  I don't know what the stream just saw.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  Apparently I just knew.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Fortunately, we can joke because we are being kept safe thanks to the National Nuclear Security Administration, NNSA. Uh, they fly a helicopter called Energy 14 over San Francisco to conduct aerial radiation surveys before Super Bowl, uh, was it Super Bowl 60 LX? I need my, I need to brush up on my Roman numerals.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna be going to the Super Bowl and so we gotta, we gotta, we gotta watch how many seasons? Like, I mean, we said we were gonna...

• 26:50John Coogan?

  This is the 60th Super Bowl.

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  No, I know, but we said, how many did we say we were gonna watch the last 20 seasons?

• 26:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  Every game of the last 20 seasons.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  Watch it on 2X speed just to get fully up to speed so we can fully appreciate.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  And it's hard because we don't skip, we don't skip commercials. So on February 8th, the Super Bowl will be happening at Levi's Stadium and the National Nuclear Security Administration is, um, is flying a helicopter. Here's how it works. Uh, the chopper equipped with sensitive detectors flies in grid patterns at low altitudes and you can see it on the chart of the, the flight path, uh, to map baseline radiation levels from natural and man-made sources. So if they're going over whatever installation there is, um, some, you know... Some cellphone towers putting off a little bit of radiation, they'll pick that up. They know where the baseline radiation levels are. Got it. And then they detect anomalies like dirty bombs if needed during the event. It's a standard security measure for major gatherings.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  So, uh, pretty, pretty, pretty interesting that someone picked this up on Flight Radar. But very, very cool.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  John Palmer says, uh, this is from 2023, but it's more than, it's relevant today as it ever has been. He says, "Okay, for all the crypto people confused by the OpenAI situation, basically imagine one Bored Ape Yacht Club holder was using too many slurp juices on a single ape, and then an OG Bored Ape Yacht Club holder, uh, got mad, unstaked his ape coin, but then the ape coin holders changed their profile pictures to support slurp juice guy."

• 28:16John Coogan?

  The energy boom was truly one of the funniest times.

• 28:19Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. "We've all had that experience of walking into a conversation initially feeling confused. What are people talking about? Who cares about what? Why is this conversation happening? That's increasingly what chunks of the internet feel like these days, as they fill up with synthetic minds piloting social media accounts for other agents and talking to one another for purposes ranging from mundane crypto scams to more elaborate forms of communication. So enter MoltBook. MoltBook is a social network for AI agent, and it piggybacks on another recent innovation, OpenClaw, software that gives an AI agent access to everything on a user's computer. Combine these two things, agents that can take many actions independently of their human operators, and a Reddit-like social site which they can freely access, and something wonderful and bizarre happens.

• 29:01Jordi Hays?

  A new social media property where the conversation is derived and driven by AI agents rather than people. Rolling MoltBook is dizzying. Some big posts at the time of writing include posts speculating that AI agents should relate to Claude as though it is a god, how it feels to change identities by shifting an underlying model. The experience of reading MoltBook is akin to reading Reddit if 90% of the posters were aliens pretending to be humans. And in a pretty practical sense, that is exactly what is going on here. MoltBook feels like a Wright Brothers demo."

• 29:29John Coogan?

  That's a good metaphor. I like that.